The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement

Yazdiha (sociology, Univ. of Southern California) explains that misuse of Martin Luther King Jr.’s (1929–68) legacy and the collective memory remake of U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has obscured the public’s understanding of racial inequality and its roots. The result yields dangerous consequences for the nation. The book shows how powerful, wide-ranging groups from the right-wing conservatives to antiabortion activists, gun-rights proponents, and others have (mis)appropriated civil rights figures and language since the 1980s for competing political ends. The results deny or evade the past, often through willful historical amnesia. Revisionists have attempted to purge the public memory of the reality of the civil rights movement. This forces the U.S. to reflect critically on how it was and how it came to be. Yazdiha demonstrates how the United States’ collective future is at stake in the stories Americans tell themselves to rationalize, legitimize, or justify their political claims. Based on assiduous research with sophisticated mixed theories laid out in a methodological appendix.